Related Field
Various embodiments of the present invention generally relate to building heating, ventilating, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems, central utility and central plant systems serving one or more buildings as such are commonly known and understood in the art, along with the one or more control systems (e.g., building automation systems (BASs), building management systems (BMSs), or the like) that automate these aforementioned systems. Various embodiments of the invention are particularly used to assess the operational functionality of these systems, define and redefine the system performance and performance limitations, and quantify the envelope of operation in terms of the metrics used to define the system upon initial design and construction.
Description of Related Art
Conventional building automation systems and/or ongoing commissioning systems may be configured to passively monitor the status of one or more devices and/or sensors associated with a particularly monitored building. In such instances, monitored or monitoring devices are typically configured to provide data to the monitoring systems periodically, on the basis of which any of a variety of analysis and/or reports may be generated. This data is typically acquired with intervals in a range of 1-15 minutes between successive data points in the logs, whereby populated data may be compiled and/or reported quite some time (e.g., six hours to even six months, or otherwise) post real-time observation of the characteristics upon which they are based.
The typical six hour to even six month delay periods for data reporting make conventional trend data oftentimes prove much less valuable as a basis for real-time data analysis than would otherwise be possible with more real-time based data analysis. This delay also makes real-time automation of maintenance and enhancement activities associated with monitored building automation systems largely unfeasible. Still further, with conventional trend data, certain events may sometimes be confined to a period between successive trend intervals or log reports or be inherently limited in range based on the automation system operating software (sequence of operations) and thus remain wholly undetected in the log, thereby leaving them unaddressed and/or unmitigated.
Additional disadvantages of conventionally pre-established data points and conventionally pre-programmed operational limits are: minimal flexibility, delayed response times, limited breadth of information, and inefficient handling of a variety of building management tasks. Such limitations of conventional building management systems create challenges to manipulating and adjusting new and/or renovated building components to meet a variety of energy efficiency standards and to operate as efficiently and predictably as practically possible.
Thus, a need exists for building-based control systems to be actively tested. This requirement for active testing is conventionally addressed by a field technician or engineer manually manipulating a building automation system while concurrently collecting data manually, by stand-alone data acquisition, and/or by collecting short-term control point trends in the control system or BAS. These conventional approaches, although often effective, are fundamentally limited in that the commands to the end devices and data collected from the end devices is all handled by the BAS and thus is vulnerable to the reliability of the BASs' operation. If a test is being conducted on a BAS or BAS element and the BAS is not working properly, the test results could be skewed or invalidated and problems could go unnoticed or be reported in a way that indicates a problem of lesser magnitude than actually exists. A need thus also exists for an external platform to perform the tests acting as a watchdog over the BAS rather than the BAS perform these convention “self-diagnostics” whether influenced by an external force or not.
In the past BASs were isolated in that individual pieces of equipment throughout the BAS operated independently such that a single malfunctioning device may or may not go unnoticed. At the present time, and more so in the future, BAS systems are passing more information over their networks that is being used to make decisions within the sequence of operations. For example, an air handling unit may change the magnitude of static pressure it supplies to the ductwork system based on the position of a device within the ductwork system (critical device). The air handling unit controller and the device controller may not be the same device and thus will typically communicate over some type of network making the sequence of operation in the air handling unit controller that is increasingly reliant on multiple devices within the control system or BAS network operating properly and reliably in order to maintain intended and efficient continuous operation. Ensuring these devices operate reliably, predictably, and continuously is not financially viable using conventional manually-intensive methods; a more efficient, effective, and near real-time approach is needed.